The first Guardians of the Galaxy trailer focused on the Marvel movie's humor, but this short…
Read more Read more

(Plus they were nice enough to put this out on my birthday, so I should be obliging and open the gift.)

Up top we see Gamora and Star-Lord making some star-crossed connection while listening to Star-Lord's 80s Walkman. In the comics, these two have never actually been romantically linked (though sparks have flown now and then), but Gamora has either fallen in love with, or at least hooked up with, several of her teammates in the past (Nova, Adam Warlock, Iron Man...). What's interesting is that she has never been put down for this (while characters like She-Hulk and Tigra have been shamed in the past). She is, after all, from an alien culture. No reason to force social mores on her (for that matter, no reason to force them on fellow humans).

Advertisement

The Walkman is a symbol of Star-Lord's past. In the comics he left Earth as an adult but was affected by aliens as a child. In the movie, it seems, he'll have left Earth as a child by the 1980s.

We had the extreme fortune of visiting the set of Marvel's new space adventure Guardians of…
Read more Read more

Chris Pratt said Rocket will have a particularly tragic backstory. While his movie origin may not match the comics, his comic book back story is fairly tragic. Rocket comes from a place called Halfworld where mentally unstable humans - called "Loonies" - were left for medical treatment, and animals were uplifted for the sole purpose of making sure the patients improved. When Rocket discovered he was the genetic equivilant of a stuffed animal given to a sick kid, he didn't take it well. Later he went into voluntary exile from Halfworld when his mind was bonded to the intergalactic killer Star-Thief's only means of escaping Halfworld. To save the universe he had to abandon his friends and family. By the way, Halfworld and his animal friends are mentioned in the Nova computer screen in the first trailer.

This may by a spare gun, but it sure looks like some kind of boot rockets. Rocket Raccoon used to get around in stylish boot rockets before trading up (or downgrading, depending on your point of view) to more traditional back-mounted jetpacks.

Star-Lord also preps his signature weapon. In the comics his Element Gun (which has had various origins and appearances over the years) has the ability to shoot any element he programs it to, including the classical Greek elements. There's a better look at his gun in the new GotG poster, also released this week.

You can't see it too well here, but the movie version of Gamora seems pretty scarred up. Gamora was taken as a child by Thanos and raised to be his assassin. Due to this childhood kinship, many consider her Thanos' adopted daughter, although it's doubtful Thanos saw it that way. In a particularly affecting story in Infinity Watch #9, readers learned she once tried to fend for herself without Thanos, only to be brutally beaten by thugs. Thanos rebuilt her as a cyborg killer (removing her ability to cry in the process). Her cinematic counterpart shares some of these childhood tragedies, and is likewise part machine (on the inside, at least).

We see a brief snippet of (what is rumored to be) the epic fight between Nebula (on the left) and Gamora (on the right). In the comics, Nebula claims to be Thanos' granddaughter (a claim he denies wholeheartedly), but in the MCU, Gamora and Nebula were raised and trained together, and both received cybernetic implants as they fell in battle at various times over the years. Interestingly, most of Nebula's cybernetics can be blamed on Gamora, who left her to die even as Nebula tried to play nice (a mistake she'll not likely repeat). Note that at the end of the teaser trailer, Gamora has only one arm, so... flashback or does Nebula take her pound of flesh?

Drax versus unbelievable odds is nothing new. What is fairly new is Drax the knife-wielding commando. Drax began his career as a fairly standard space-based hero in the 1970s, and in the 90s was transformed into a gibbering idiot - his status quo for quite a while. In the 2005 mini-series Drax the Destroyer (collected as Drax the Destroyer: Earthfall because people love colons) his body changed yet again and he became a sleeker, more methodical killing machine.

More on the trailer in three days!

EDIT: And there's a second teaser for the new trailer.

This one showcases the Kyln, the prison on the edge of space which first appeared in a great story arc in Thanos #7-12, collected in Thanos: Redemption.